


#include "light.h"

by cmshaw



Category: Tron: Betrayal, Tron: Evolution, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Family, Gen, Other character death, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 21:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cmshaw/pseuds/cmshaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every religion concerns itself with compilation and deresolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. HTTP Status 201 Created

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bobthemole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobthemole/gifts).



Going into the portal reminds her of being born. Quorra's memory logs have large gaps in their earliest sections, with hardly any mappable data for the first four centicycles, but what she does remember is largely concerned with a spinning sensation, motion cohering as she developed a self which could move, and a sudden sharpness to the light around her as she reached the shore. The clarity of the light is what she calls her first true memory when someone asks --

It's been hectocycles since that's been an acceptable topic of conversation. Basic programs come online with a tingling sensation, they say, sluggish in their bodies until they're fully booted up, like heavy sleepers with no morning caff. ISOs, maybe because they're all born outdoors in the Sea of Simulation instead of in the city hospital, tended to be more concerned with their surroundings than their sensations. When the system was younger, asking about a program's first memories was a popular pick-up line in the ISO bars.

Of course, it's also been hectocycles since there were any new programs born. Early memory logs are often archived as unimportant. Hospitals have long since torn out their old compilation birth chambers and repurposed them as repair/recompile suites for the high-end programs.

Users write in their books that their lives flash before their eyes as they derezz. Quorra wonders, as the portal light coheres into several different wavelengths and splits her across their spectrum, if that's what's happening to her. It's not quite a spinning sensation, but it's the closest mapping she can find.

Then there's a blank in her memory.

Quorra blinks, trying to resolve the date stamps and determine the cause. She scrambles to her feet, hand closing around her disc, and takes a defensive stance over Sam's body. Sam is moving, groaning like he's in pain -- well, Quorra is also in pain. If it's the same pain, he's probably fine. It's very dark here, and few of the lights are sharp. There's a dim yellow light panel in the wall above them and a console with a handful of status displays, but the air here smells like the Outlands and it's gritty, bringing to mind the aftermath of an explosion.

"Sam?" she says. Sam's been through the portal before; he's a User. He'll know if this is a malfunction.

"Oh man," Sam says, pushing himself up onto his hands. "We made it. I -- Dad."

Quorra tucks her hand under Sam's arm and helps him stand. "This is correct, then?"

"What?" Sam says. "Oh, yeah. This is Dad's old lab. It's -- hey, let's move out of range of the laser, okay?" He stumbles away from the console and she follows.

This doesn't look like a place that Flynn would design, but perhaps it's been damaged, which would also explain the smell. Quorra reaches back to touch her disc again, but abruptly processes the memory that it's not her disc at all. Her hand spasms open.

"Hey, are you okay?" Sam says. "I mean, wow. You're here. How did that even work?"

Quorra shrugs. "Flynn never explained the portal."

"But you feel okay?" Sam asks again.

"I feel low on energy, but it's not too bad," Quorra says. She shrugs again, analyzing the motion this time. "And -- did my clothes get damaged? My light circuits are unresponsive and the material feels almost inert."

Sam bites his lip. "Clothing is usually inert in the real world. The User world, I mean. I feel kind of weird myself and, hey, I'm just now noticing the lack of, uh, undergarments. Clean clothes sounds like a really great idea. And a shower. And a pizza. Seriously, all the pizza." He scrubs at his face with his hands.

"Pizza is a food?" she confirms.

"Pizza is one of the best foods," Sam says. "Dad never coded up a pizza, seriously? In all that time?" He studies her for a moment. "Come on," he says, wrapping one hand around her upper arm and tugging. "We have a lot of time to make up for."


	2. Any technology which can be distinguished from magic is insufficiently advanced

The room above their entry point is much brighter and also louder. It sounds like a dance club, although Quorra doesn't recognize any of the music and it's eerily empty. The consoles form crowded lanes and they all have old-fashioned controls and writing in identity script -- no, in the User script from which the identity script was derived.

Sam pushes a console across the opening to their staircase, concealing it. On the wall above it is written TRON in the same script.

 _I dreamed of Tron,_ Flynn said. Quorra replays his voice in her mind, breathing through the sudden shock of realizing that she'll never hear it live again. She stares at the name as she blinks back tears, only to watch as its light sputters and dies to darkness. There's nothing left but an afterimage and an empty light frame.

"What happened here?" Quorra says. "What caused all of this damage?"

"The arcade was Dad's place," Sam says. "Nobody wanted to believe he wasn't coming back, so it wasn't sold off right away, and then I guess we all just forgot it was here."

"Is it so old that there was no permissions reset built in?" she asks hesitantly. Among Flynn's cautionary tales had been stories of programs from other systems whose trust whitelists were accidentally wiped out, leaving them so paranoid that no User could entice them near again. Sometimes whole sectors had to be derezzed to bring them under control; this place looks like it's losing pixels left and right.

Sam blinks, as if he needs a moment to process her question. "No, uh, it's mine," he says. "I inherited it, anyway. Alan had the trust. But nobody really wants a video game arcade anymore. I mean, I could play all of these games on my phone now."

Did the TRON name flicker when Sam spoke Alan's name? Alan had featured in Flynn's stories as well. Quorra shakes her head. "These are all games?"

"Really old ones, yeah," Sam says. He points to a console with stripped-down tank controls and artistic impressions of recognizers printed on it. A translucent covering flaps against the raised top of the viewscreen. "Space Paranoids, the game that started it all."

"Space Paranoids was a remedial tank simulator?" she says.

Sam actually laughs. "Yeah, pretty much. You sound surprised?"

"Flynn told me about it. He used some of the code for lessons, in fact," she says. Gently she presses her fingers to a corner of the console, but it doesn't react to her. "He never said what it looked like, and I never saw all of the code at once. I had friends from before who worked in security and trained on tank programs, but they never talked about their test runs. I know Mony did a lot of work with Shaddox and Tron to develop better targeting, but mostly to us she complained about the lack of decent documentation and always having to be the one to brew the next pot of caff."

"That sounds like just about any workplace on this side of the portal," Sam says. "This is why I dropped out of college."

"Really?" Quorra says. She's a little suspicious of his sense of humor on this subject.

"No, not really," he admits, and she snorts.

"I, uh." Sam shuffles his feet. "I could probably dig up an old copy of the Space Paranoids code, if you want. Me, I want to see what you make of the Grid code from the outside."

"You'd share that with me?" Quorra says. She turns away from the console, and Sam looks happy as he meets her eyes.

"Well, it's yours as much as mine, right?" he says. "We just have to work out the red tape. So that makes it thing number, um, Spanish Inquisition." He counts off on his fingers. "Clothes, pizza, shower, street-legal i.d., actually legal i.d., deal with the new universe in the arcade basement. Okay, six things, maybe even in that order."

Quorra reaches back to touch her hand to where Flynn's disc has replaced her own. "Yes. I've lost my identity."

"You'd need a new one anyway, for this world," Sam says. "Come on, let's hop to it."


	3. Magic/More Magic

Sam pushes the big doors at the end of the room open with a flourish. They step out onto a street level. It's dark and deserted in this sector, although light is reflecting from the clouds above them as if from a livelier area. Beside her Sam takes a deep breath, kneels, and puts his hand flat against the ground. "Oh, fuck yes," he says.

"Are you okay?" Quorra asks him.

Sam laughs and pushes himself back up. "Yeah, I suddenly had this awful fear that we didn't actually get out. But this is definitely real. Or else -- no, no way am I going down that route. This is real. Good old concrete."

Quorra kneels and touchs the surface herself, wondering how he determined the difference. Her gloves shift over her fingertips and don't transmit much information; she decides that the texture of the ground must be rough on a micro scale because of the way the material of her glove catches against it. Most of it is not just unlit but some sort of matte finish which doesn't reflect light. It feels concrete, but not more so than anything else she's touched. Maybe it feels different to a User.

She stands, looking back at the building, and suddenly it maps onto a street corner she knows. Identity script for _FLYNN'S_ lights up the night above them: Flynn's, belonging to Flynn. This is his abode in Tron City, at least for the first few levels. Above that, all of the buildings around them end, and there are no bridges or walkways over the familiar boulevards.

"This is Flynn's old office," she says.

Sam gives her a dubious look. "Didn't we go over that already?"

"No, in the Grid," she says.

"Right!" Sam says. "I remember that. That was really weird, when I first arrived in there." He shares a smile with her. "I guess it's just as weird for you in this direction, huh."

"Yes," she says.

"I wonder why he didn't put the entrance by the portal," Sam says. "That seems like the obvious place for it."

"The portal is -- was -- is dangerous," Quorra says. "The office was a WOM room that reset every time he used it, so it was always clear."

"A WOM room?" Sam repeats. "You mean womb, like giving birth?"

It takes a moment to parse that. "No, WOM, write-only memory. It made him invisible in there, like a tarnhelm. I guess a womb room would be a compilation chamber, right?"

"Is that how programs get born?" Sam asks. "Or, hey, that reminds me. If I'm making up some i.d. for you, what are your parents' names?"

"It's how Basic programs are born," Quorra says, "but ISOs don't have parents either. Parents are a User thing."

"You don't have parents?" Sam says. "But I thought ISOs were, you know, natural."

Quorra nods. "We rose out of the Sea of Simulation, before Clu poisoned it. No one compiled us."

Sam frowns. "But who took care of you?"

"Radia was my mentor in many things," Quorra says, bowing her head for a moment's remembrance. "I was an Arjian when I was young, even though I lost my faith quickly." And that -- the irony is so painful that it overwrites her acceptance of the loss before she realizes it.

"Is an Arjian a type of ISO?" Sam asks.

"No," she says, grateful for the distraction. "Basics and ISOs both could be Arjians. Radia preached of a world beyond our world into which the Creator could usher us."

"You had an actual religion?" Sam says incredulously. "How can programs have a religion?"

Quorra frowns. "We know our Creator," she says.

"You worshiped my Dad," Sam says flatly.

"Of course," Quorra says. "He created our world, didn't he?" She gestures around her, at the concrete street. "And here I am, ushered into the world beyond. Just like the Arjians believed. Radia -- she spent a lot of time with Flynn. She told us stories of the Users when he wasn't with us. She--" and Quorra hears her voice breaking up, the signal failing as her memories overwhelm her again.

In the early cycles after the Purge, Flynn would sit beside her when she cried. He would breathe in and out in a steady rhythm for her to follow.

Now Flynn's destroyed along with everyone else and Flynn's son is awkwardly patting her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he says.

Quorra swallows and nods, trying to recall Flynn's lessons for calm breathing, the ones which always seem so easy until she actually needs them.

After a couple of microcycles of poor attempts at breathing, hers and Sam's both, Sam says, "My mother was an architect. She died when I was really young, so I don't exactly have real memories of her, but Alan used to drive me around the city and point out all of the buildings that she was responsible for. I, uh, I guess I didn't always use those blueprints in ways Alan approved of, but I kind of hoped that Mom would've. I mean, she married Dad and all, you know?"

Quorra nods. Flynn had rarely spoken of Sam's mother, but the little he had said made her seem like a powerfully creative User and a strong ally.

Sam shakes his head as if trying to clear his cache, then manages a smirk. "You guys didn't have, like, a whole pantheon for us Users, did you?"

"Oh yes," Quorra tells him. "There were four feast points in each cycle when we ritually slaughtered a pizza for you."

"Uh," Sam says, and Quorra can't stop a small snicker. "Are you messing with me?"

"I don't even know what a pizza is, remember?" Quorra says.

Sam snorts. "Come on, we're going to go kill a fatted one." He keeps his arm around her shoulder. "We can sit down and talk about all of the rubbish things Dad did and how come our moms put up with him."

"Actually I think Radia kicked him out of Arjia City the last time they talked," Quorra admits.


	4. A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for

"Come on, my bike's around here," Sam says, and leads her over to a cycle that's either half derezzed or done in the strangest style she's ever seen. Ducati, says the writing on it, and she remembers Flynn and Sam discussing it.

"I don't have a cycle baton on me," she says. "What will I ride?"

Sam smiles and pats the cycle as they reach it. "Don't worry," he says, "she can take two. We'll see about getting you one of your own later. They don't really handle as much like lightcycles as you'd think, but I bet you'll get the hang of it fast."

Sam slings a leg over the cycle and beckons her to follow him. She settles herself carefully behind him, pleased that her balance seems unchanged in this world.

"Lean forward against me," Sam says, and she shifts until they're stable together. "Hang on and move with me, but not too much."

Sam's body feels hot like an overloaded circuit where she wraps her arms about him. Flynn used to feel like that, she remembers; she hadn't realized just how much he must have slowly cooled over the kilocycle of his exile. It's a mournful thought, and she's glad when Sam revs the cycle and kicks them into motion.

The cycle runs dark, only a few lights in front of Sam and a larger one illuminating the dark ground they're traversing. The buildings around them are small and unlit. Still, it's always good to be moving.

"So," Sam calls over the growl of the cycle, "we get you a birth certificate with your mother listed as Radia Iso, right?"

"What's a birth certificate?" she calls back.

"It's the first i.d. a User gets when they're born," Sam says. "It says when and where you were born and who your parents are."

"I'm not a User," Quorra points out.

"You are now," Sam says.

Quorra shakes her head, wondering if Sam can feel the motion. "You didn't stop being a User when you entered the Grid," she says. "Why would I stop being a program when I leave it?"

"No one's going to believe you," Sam says.

"That's why I have to change the world," Quorra says, grinning.

Sam laughs. "Until then," he says, "do you want to be Quorra Iso or Quorra Flynn, legally?"

"I can't be Flynn," she says. "That's your job now."

Sam leans the cycle into a turn at the crossroads and speeds up. Some of the buildings here are faintly illuminated. Three Users are standing on the walkway; Quorra stares at them as she and Sam fly past.

"You don't get it," Sam says. "We're family now. Like the fans say, Flynn Lives in all of us, but maybe -- maybe you more than anyone."

They reach the top of the incline. Quorra squeezes Sam tightly as, all at once, a city lights up before them, as tall and alive as anything Quorra's ever seen.

"Oh," she breathes, "the lights." The User world isn't all dark after all.

"Just wait until the sun rises," Sam tells her. "That's real light."

Quorra's hair whips back and forth across her face from the turbulence of their passage. "Then I'll choose my name when the sun rises," she says.

**Author's Note:**

> Story title from C++ language created by Bjarne Stroustrup  
> Chapter 1 title from Internet Engineering Task Force standards  
> Chapter 2 title from Barry Gehm's Corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law  
> Chapter 3 title from Jargon Files: Appendix A, Hacker Folklore  
> Chapter 4 title from Admiral Grace Hopper


End file.
